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It’s Good to Be the Caliph

He certainly looks the part. According to the militant group formerly known as the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant, there is a new caliph in town: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the “leader for Muslims everywhere,” as he was called in a recorded announcement last week. ISIL later released a video of a man said to be Baghdadi leading Friday prayers at the Great Mosque in Mosul and looking every bit the warrior-turned-imam, with a full beard and black turban and robe. In the Madmen era, this announcement would have been characterized as running something up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. The title “caliph,” after all, is not something that any Tom, Dick and Ahmad with a few thousand soldiers holding sway over a great swath of desert can simply claim.

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Al Qaeda tried much the same thing in 2001. Osama bin Laden made no personal claim to the caliphate, but he called on Muslims everywhere to come to Afghanistan and engage in a jihad led by the “commander of the faithful,” Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban and head of state of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, an entity recognized only by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. Bin Laden’s naming of a commander of the faithful served a somewhat useful function insofar as the caliphs of medieval times had a legal right to declare a jihad, but it is hard to imagine that many non-Afghan Muslims were drawn into international jihad by the reclusive Mullah Omar rather than by the charismatic Bin Laden.

Now ISIL—the brutal band of fighters who have terrified the Iraqi government by driving to the outskirts of Baghdad in recent weeks—has renamed Baghdadi “Caliph Ibrahim,” presumably to call to mind the Biblical Abraham, whom Muslims consider the patriarch of Islam.And they have declared it “incumbent upon all Muslims to pledge allegiance to [him] and support him.” ISIL’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said “the legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the caliph’s authority and the arrival of its troops to their areas.”

This announcement will carry almost no weight in the Muslim world, now or in the future. But before we explain why and assess whether ISIL—which has begun calling itself simply Islamic State—is dramatically overestimating its power and influence thanks to its stunning but still limited series of military victories, perhaps we should take a longer historical look at what is going on here. No doubt the reason Baghdadi has taken this step is that he knows how significant the idea of a caliphate is in Islamic thought. Indeed, it has theoretically embodied the central tenet of legitimacy in Islam for 1,400 years, even though an effective political caliphate has rarely been seen for 1,100 of those years. Though this has not prevented a string of pretenders from laying claim to the title, the historical truth is that by the late 19th century the titles caliph and Commander of the Faithful had lost most of their allure and virtually all of their claim to universal leadership of the fragmented world Muslim community.

What draws Muslim political figures to the title is the notion, fully spelled out in Islamic law (sharia), that a legitimate caliph is entitled to declare Holy War (jihad), call upon Muslims everywhere to join his army and demand that all states or principalities identifying with the Muslim faith recognize him as their overlord. This is what ISIL appears to be doing.

Nevertheless, the word caliph, like sharia itself—a term that in recent decades has signaled to most hearers not a coherent, sophisticated and centuries-old system of law but rather irrational cruelty in the form of stoning adulterers and amputating the hands of thieves—has taken on a meaning that reflects very little of its original weight and power. The modern shorthand version of the term, dating from the late 19th-century reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, formally identified its bearer as the universally recognized and religiously legitimate supreme political leader of all the world’s Sunni Muslims, but this proved to be a hollow claim since relatively few of the world’s Muslims swore allegiance to the sultan and he never proclaimed a meaningful jihad. It actually served more as a feel-good epithet for Abdul Hamid’s dictatorship than as a workable basis for universal Muslim rule. In fact, despite its roots in Islamic political theory, the term had been completely hollow for some seven centuries before Abdul Hamid II ascended to the throne.

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The concept of caliph—which means “successor”—emerged from the earliest debates in Islam about who should take over after the Prophet Mohammad’s death. According to most accounts of early Islamic history, his nascent religious community in Medina faced both external and internal threats. In the farther reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, rival religious leaders had attracted tribal followers, and some tribes that had pledged allegiance to Mohammad and his god Allah decided to go their own way. There was no consensus on who could replace the charismatic Mohammad. After all, the faithful firmly believed that Mohammad was on the receiving end of divine revelation, and that no future leader could ever make such a claim.

Different sources tell somewhat different stories about how Muhammad’s close friend and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, came to be accepted as the community’s leader over the next few days, but the titles caliph and commander of the faithful soon emerged. Though scholars debate the semantic implications of the word caliph, the job that faced Abu Bakr was clear. He needed to protect the community from whatever threatened its dissolution, whether an external force or internal dissension. But in doing this, he could not claim divine inspiration, because the Quran, God’s word conveyed through Muhammad, designated Muhammad as God’s last messenger to humankind. Nor could he issue laws, because the implicit and explicit laws contained in the Quran, as interpreted through the day-to-day practice of Muhammad as the community’s leader, constituted a tradition, in Arabic a sunna, that sufficed for all worldly and otherworldly affairs. Nor could he claim a hereditary right to rule, because he was not a member of Muhammad’s clan in their home city of Mecca, and his daughter, Aisha, who was married to Muhammad, had no children. Abu Bakr’s legitimacy, therefore, rested on his commitment to continuing Muhammad’s sunna and his effectiveness in defending the Muslim community, even if that meant waging war against unbelievers.

Richard Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society and institutions.